Total Estimated Decontamination Costs At OK Military Bases By 2100 - $677 Million
A government program to clean up 503 contaminated military sites across Oklahoma will have cost an estimated $677 million by the time it concludes at the end of the century, Department of Defense records show. Tinker Air Force Base alone has required $277 million in evaluation and cleanup, with another $46 million needed between now and 2027, according to data released Thursday by ProPublica. Cleanup at Will Rogers World Airport is expected to cost more than $7 million by the time it ends in 2021.
Elsewhere in the state, the removal of explosives, munitions, arsenic and lead is expected to last until the year 2099. One site, deemed “high risk” by the federal government, is a popular hunting spot. Defense Department records explain, for the first time, the extent to which military installations have polluted the earth and water around them. They also detail the extensive, centurylong effort necessary to remedy such contamination.
At Tinker, the state's largest employer, a firing range has contaminated the soil beneath it with lead and a $1.1 million cleanup effort began there in October. Cleanup of contaminated groundwater in the AWACS sector will take place in 2021. Though the Defense Department expects environmental work at Tinker to end in 2027, monitoring is expected to last until 2058.
Contamination cleanup at the base dates back to 1985, when an industrial waste pit was decontaminated. Records show several landfills have undergone cleanup after polluting nearby groundwater and soil, costing millions of dollars. In 2005, $4.3 million was spent to remove an underground plume of the carcinogen trichloroethylene that was 2,000 feet long and 1,000 feet wide, according to Defense Department records. In 2006, another plume of trichloroethylene, 750 feet in length, was found to be encroaching on nearby water supplies, costing $3.1 million to clean up.
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